Please don’t misconstrue: I read flash fiction; I edit flash fiction; I occasionally write it. But I have doubts about it.During one of the “Form & Theory of Fiction” classes I took while doing my MFA, the incredibly gifted Lucinda Roy had us read SUDDEN FICTION INTERNATIONAL, a flash collection edited by Robert Shapard & James Thomas. Mid-way through reading it, I experienced a sudden sense of dissatisfaction. Individually, the stories were remarkable. Yet taken together as a forced feeding, I began to wonder whether some might work better as sections within larger works.At the time, I was experiencing a crisis of vision. The previous semester, the stories I wrote were all 30+ pages, but in that particular semester I has difficulty extending anything for more than a few pages. False starts were my specialty. I’d write what I thought were wonderfully satisfying opening sections but then not be able to “see” what the next logical step in the story might be. Who knows? Maybe I was depressed.The previous semester, in a workshop also taught by Roy, we read David Guterson’s SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. One of our discussions focused on how a miniscule section of the novel (when Hatsue and Ishmael meet in the hollow of a cedar tree) could have been a brilliant piece of flash fiction.[Now that I think of it, the section where the girls are hiking through the forest in ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” could also work as flash fiction.]Along with psychologically destroying lovers and wives, Ernest Hemingway is famous for positing the earliest known example of proto-twitter fiction: “For Sale: Baby Shoes, never worn.”As ripe with possibilities as Hemingway’s “story” might be, I just don’t find it satisfying. At best, it’s a scenario… and as Flannery O’Connor implies, scenario ≠ story.I’ve been thinking about this today because yesterday a friend, Aubrey Hirsch, expressed that she can’t get a handle on writing stories that are less than 250 words. And I feel her pain. Micro fiction has become extremely popular. Over the summer, I was asked to write a 50-word story; try as I did, I just couldn’t do it. Recently, I came across two examples of micro-fiction that I thought were stellar:1) Len Kuntz’s “Lost” (check about halfway down the page)2) Roxane Gay’s “The Anatomy of a Good Woman”Reading these makes me very confident that I’ll never be able to produce anything as exceptional with so few words. But there’s also part of me that, as a reader, wishes the stories would extend for 10 or 20 pages. I want to be lost in a fictional world, rather than pass through one so quickly that I hardly realized I’ve traveled.So. What are you feelings about flash? Or micro? Constricted spaces used to be the strict domain of poets. Can fiction writers equipped to plough those fields?